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I have a little problem. I'm addicted to cookbooks, food writing, recipe collecting, and cooking. I have a lot of recipes waiting for me to try them, and ideas from articles, tv, and restaurants often lead to new dishes. I started losing track of what I've done. So now I'm taking photos and writing about what I've prepared—unless it's terrible in which case I forget it ever happened.

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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

At Christmas time, I baked several kinds of cookies to share with family and friends. I had a list of all the cookies I wanted to try, but I only got to about half of them. These chocolate covered cherry cookies were on that other half of the list. When I ran out of time in December, I started thinking about a baking list for Valentine’s Day and put these cookies at the top of it. I saw these delicious looking treats and used the recipe found on A Good Appetite.

They are thumb-print cookies with half a maraschino cherry tucked into the indentation with chocolate spooned on top. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. I located some all-natural maraschino cherries, Silver Palate brand, at Whole Foods. They have no artificial colors and no preservatives, and they taste great. Simple cookie, great ingredients, what could go wrong? Turns out, I nearly completely failed at making these cookies. My melted chocolate and sweetened condensed milk mixture must have been too runny. When I took the cookies out of the oven, it had practically disappeared. Notice the bottom right photo below. That is what failure looks like.

Not willing to give up so easily, I decided to let the cookies cool while I considered my options. I thought I could sneekily re-top them with melted milk chocolate and no one would ever know. My plan was to send these to my nieces for Valentine’s Day, so I went with milk chocolate for the final topping instead of semisweet. That chocolate topping worked ok, and the cookies were brought back from the brink. I can’t wait to find out if my nieces enjoyed the cookies or if they could taste the bitterness of near failure.